In Grandmother's Bed - a poem from her debut collection, Red Lacquered Chopsticks - Betty Warrington-Kearsley details how paternal grandsons got to sleep closer to their grandmother than their sisters, who were allowed closer than maternal grandsons and granddaughters.
'It never made sense to me that it was resolutely upheld by my Chinese grandmother, who had always supported fairness,' she says. 'It offended my sense of gender equality.'
Yet the inequality the author has to deal with more often is of a racial nature. Born in Cheshire, England, in 1942, she's the daughter of an Englishman and a Singaporean-Chinese woman.
She has experienced discrimination in varying degrees in all the places she has lived, she says, even though she's comfortable being bicultural. The book's title poem identifies both 'the Anglo-Saxon who rises in the morning dressed for breakfast hankering for kedgeree, toast, marmalade and tea' and 'the Sino who slips downstairs at dawn in Shanghai silks and kimono, craving for congee'.
'Growing up in Singapore, surrounded by children of single heritage such as Chinese or Malay, I suffered daily until my father told me I have two whole cultures, not half of each,' she says. 'While the discrimination in Singapore was mainly on the basis of my being part-English, my problems in England and, to a much lesser degree, in Canada [where she now lives] were related to my being part-Chinese. But thanks to my father's words, I'm neither conflicted nor confused.'
Warrington-Kearsley left Singapore in utero during the second world war when her mother boarded the last ship to escape as Singapore fell to the Japanese. Her mother stayed with her English grandparents, awaiting her father's escape from the former colony.